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US Air Force Scraps ERP Project After $1 Billion Spent
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending $1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain. Dubbed the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), the project has racked up $1.03 billion in costs since 2005, 'and has not yielded any significant military capability,' an Air Force spokesman said in a statement. 'We estimate it would require an additional $1.1B for about a quarter of the original scope to continue and fielding would not be until 2020. The Air Force has concluded the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement. Therefore, we are canceling the program and moving forward with other options in order to meet both requirements.'"
I'd like to see them implement a CRM system instead
Never look back at the carnage.
Seems that this is a common theme with ERP rollouts-- scope creep tends to get them all in the end. Granted, most organizations seem to wave off long before the $1 billion mark...
They were writing it in Ada and targeting Windows NT 4.
For wasting so much money, and they would do so formally at a press conference. I suppose money is just money in the US. Burn through as much as possible it seems
If I blew a billion dollars I'd get fired.
Just saying.
I know lots of programmers who can get the same result for half the price.
From my observations, I've concluded that no organizational group works toward reducing its size, reducing the amount of its discretionary budget, or increasing its accountability for the preceding.
Any exceptions?
Those billions could have put a man on mars, or housed many,many homeless people, or any of a bunch of other uses. When will we realize that most of out debt is crime useless military spending, not social programs?
Silence is a state of mime.
There should be a criminal negligence investigation into this.
With at least eight full-lifecycle development projects under my belt as both a Software Engineer and a Development Team Lead I cannot even wrap my mind around the amount of irresponsible waste that would be required to throw away that much money.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
The real news here is that a branch of the military actually avoided the sunk cost fallacy. I know it's probably not the first time. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder if they will use the money they save for porcine pilot training.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Thief In Chief blew over an extra *trillion* *every* *year* and people weren't' smart enough to fire him.
Well, that didn't take long.
I think I must have spent too much time idly hanging out in RP areas like Pocket D in City of Heroes and The Busted Flagon in Guild Wars 2. Shamefully, I first saw the headline "US Air Force Scraps ERP Project..." as "US Air Force Scraps Erotic Role Play Project..."
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Since this thread is just going to be a bunch of "zomg wasted muney!" why don't you educate academics like me about what exactly "ERP" systems are and what you do with it and why its so great?
The university I work at gets new crazy "enterprise" software sometimes and usually it ends up offloading some of the work the bureaucrats used to do on me (purchasing paperwork) meanwhile they take 51% of my grant money.
So tell me, WHY?
Why should I or you believe this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There may be some true information in the story and citations. $1 billion in costs does not mean $1 billion flow of cash. Also, a contract with a dollar value of X doesn't mean it will not include Y costs.
I don't want to speculate for a number of very good reasons. But let's consider how much we spend in research through direct government funding and through corporations. Just consider that in light of the extraordinary claims.
I contacted the ECSS Chief Engineer about a year ago to get more details on the architecture (I was being tasked to lead the effort to design a "new" enterprise wide architecture for the AF) and she blew me off.
I am now happily in a new position, with a higher grade. I dont know if the Chief Engineer was still there til the bitter end, but I can't help but feel a little glee.
...price of oracle shares skyrockets
Compare to our Canadian (1/10 population) gun registry it cost up to $2B and scrapped.
ERP is a bunch of disparate functions mashed together then held in place with a metric assload of duck tape. It's only natural that if you try to tacle the whole thing at once the result will be a sort of dynamic paralysis where you run back and forth in a nearly random pattern burning money all the way.
Just as well, if you ever manage to build the thing, you'll create paralysis across the entire company if you suddenly drop this chimera on people's desks.
Note, I am NOT claiming that the individual functions aren't necessary nor am I claiming that they shouldn't support common data formats.I am claiming that trying to build the whole thing at once and as a single 'solution' is wrong headed and doomed to failure.
Geez, SAP would have charged them that much from the start for not delivering anything.
Perfect application of Hanlon's Razor: Not so much a conspiracy to waste money as the worst combination of both world (defense acquisition and enterprise software development). Both fields are very prone to overruns, scope creep, and repeated waste of funds as manager after manager--or contractor after contractor--throws away work to start over again. Another great example is the FAA's version of enterprise software, which is currently at $63.4 BILLION and counting (though, to be fair, it's quite possible the most complicated software project in the world).
Still, there are worse examples--specifically, when these kinds of overruns, violations, and program restarts are done deliberately to ensure continued funding to entrenched players in a limited field and / or to pursue minor permutations on someone's pet dream of a project. This can occur at the cost of throwing away many years and billions of dollars of decent work while never really getting closer to a functioning system. Space Launch System, anyone? (Not a software example, but the line between software and aerospace engineering is a lot thinner than most people realize.)
If only they'd had a better ERP system, they could've planned this project more carefully, and put all those resources to better use.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister.
Obama is in charge... the buck stops with him; he's the one who brags about his "kill list"... Oh, wait, this is Slashdot... Obama has a GREAT smile and a cool attitude and nobody is to blame for the drone strikes. Move along, nothing to see here. Dick Cheney is retired so there is no evil to be denounced.
ERP is dead--especially for very large, agile institutions. The only people that don't think so are companies, like Oracle, that are pretending that it can scale to large institutions with some sort of economy of scale, let alone ones that probably make many changes. The fact that it took the Air Force an extra $900+ million to realize this is shameful. Especially since institutions like the Air Force are probably better off looking at agile and adaptive front-end software (it's not just the Marines that are supposed to "improvise, overcome, and adapt") like their equivalent to CRM, project planning, mobile maintenance, and whatever else they do.
What a waste of time, money, and resources. Truly shameful!!!
I wouldn't be surprised that the DoD is encouraging this. In this way, each branch picks their own solution because they need to satisfy so many domestic "interests". (Yes, SAP America contributes to political campaigns and PACs, just like every other large ERP company in the US). Besides, the only reason that anyone has been successful is probably because they are sipping more Kool-Aid and sitting in a circle "reassuring" one another.
Talking about the central argument from Intelligent Design proponents (something is so complex that it must have been designed), a coworker of mine said it works exactly the other way around: If something is too complex, it can't possibly have been designed.
If I had to "design" something of this scope, I simply wouldn't. I would design something simple that accomplishes some useful tiny subset of the requirements. I would also concentrate on the interfaces between parts of the organization, so the project can be decomposed into more manageable parts. Then you add functionality progressively, until you have organically evolved a complete solution.
Of course, this might result in a big ball of mud, but (a) that's probably better than not having a system at all, and (b) you can refactor parts of the system as you need and try to keep things under control (this is hard to do).
I guess this way of doing thing doesn't mesh well with monolithic management styles that characterize large government organizations.
ERP is dead because word is on the street: Too many failed or seriously delayed implementations.
I have seen (first hand) too many institutions decide to implement ERP, pay a tremendous amount of cash, and watch it fail. If it ever does get fully implemented (in a way that was originally envisioned) the institutions have spent so much time and effort to get it running that the institutions have lost their focus because senior management was distracted or the cost of full implementation has affected the bottom line. In some cases, the institution was irreparably damaged or failed.(often surpassed by their competition).
In theory, ERP is a wonderful thing. In actuality, it can kill.
I am sure that there are some successes. When there are, the institution tries to keep it a secret so their competition cannot find out what system they use. They also often keep mum about the additional facilitators, consultants, etc. that were essential in getting it going.
Obama does share the blame. I mean he was president during 4 years of that debacle and didn't put it to sleep sooner. In fact, the cutting of it was done by the military itself in order to get a working solution in place to meet the deadlines of a law passed.
Considering the Air Force has about 300k-540k employees, that ERP just cost them between $2000 and $4000 per personal to develop and scrap. It's not that bad, I guess it's easy to spend that amount of money on ERP thingies even in small companies.
ERP implementation is tricky, there are a lot of subtle decisions that - if made wrongly early on - can cost down the line.
At the end of the day it's a tool. Smart people will use a tool well and dumb people will use it badly. And they'll probably use the wrong tool anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Reading that as Erotic Roleplay just made the summary sound so much more interesting, though.
$1 billion behind an ERP system. It'd be like the Matrix, but even MORE real!
And woman in red dresses everywhere! Also, elephants and goblins raids!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's silly.
You can get a copy of WoW for like 20 bucks and find plenty of ERP in Goldshire.
Oh my God..... 1 Billion??!! If only they hired us and purchased our ERP software, not only they will save $999.000.000,-, they will get working ERP software that can be accessed anywhere through the Internet for a mere $1.000.000,- for real maybe one of the reader are from the project and interested in our product. Can contact me need.erp.solution@gmail.com (need.erp.solution @ gmail . com). It will forward your email to the right person to contact :)
How is that partisan? *All* recent Thieves-in-Chief blow trillions, what changes is who the main beneficents are.
Dubya: big oil, military contractors
B. Hussein: wall street, big media, big pharma
[would be] Mittens: wall street, wall street, wall street
And Obama's bailout has been more harmful that all recent wars put together. It ensured no financial companies not connected to the main mafia can thrive: they were either bankrupted, bought out or marginalized, while investors received a clear message that their money can be safe if they go with those "too big to fail". And even worse, the wave of bailouts spread to Europe and rest of the word, and shows no signs of subsiding.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Navy has Maintenance/MSC that works to integrate logistical support from the supply division with known demands of various preventative maintenance schedules and other engineering related operations that maintains a ship's readiness. Basically it works as a knowledge center and database to ensure technicians actually get the right things from the supply chain and get them on a timely basis. (Supply doesn't have the "need to know" and has other services to take care of so that's why MAINT was created.) It's an actual shipboard department with it's own command structure, but it strongly integrates and works with GSA contractors. I wouldn't say it's exactly perfect, but from my experience as an MSC tech before I left I'd say it worked pretty damn good for what it was.
Since I was on a carrier, the airwing command also had a similar department, but with needs more catered to aircraft operations.
I'm just surprised the Air Force doesn't already have something like it. Shouldn't take $1 billion either, provided they don't have too much pride to copy-pasta how a system works from another branch of the military. It may take some fine tuning, but a system for the purpose described with software and organizational infrastructure already exists.
Air Force Generals? Go talk to an Admiral. See what's up. It's not that hard.
It was a total success then, as these projects are designed to spend money, not actually produce any usable results ...
AccountKiller
Whew, that was close! Can you even imagine if that +$1 billion had fallen into the hands of poor people? (Shudder)
Bullshit. I have been involved in dozens of ERP implementations over the years. The software works. When implementations fail it is always, in my experience, because of the people (i.e. management) making the decisions on how to implement the product.
Me: "Let me show you how Product X handles Accounts Payable"
Client: "That's not how we do it"
Me: "This might be a good opportunity to take a look at your current business practices and see if they can be done in a more efficient way"
Client: "But we've always done it this way"
Me: "Why?"
Client "Dunno...just always have. And I doubt that the team is willing to change"
Me: "Ok, we can customize the product to make it work the way you want but it's going to take more time and money. And when you do an upgrade later on there will be implications as well"
Client: "Fine. Just make it work the way we do it now"
And so it goes. Time and again I see clients go out and buy an expensive ERP system only to customize the bejezus out of it to make it look exactly like the systems they are retiring. They are not open to better business practices. Too many political headwinds.
What does this say about these clowns in the Air Force? It takes them 10 years and $1.03B to realize that the project is going to fail? On an original budget of $88M? One of the big problems with trying to shoehorn a best practice ERP system into a large government institution is that often they employ worst practices. They won't, or can't, change them so you have to end up rewriting the product to fit their ass backwards ways. The whole purpose of implementing an ERP system is to replace aging, stove-piped systems with modern integrated systems. It can work well if it's implemented properly and the right decisions are made along the way. But it's not a magic pill.
The Pentagon spends over five billion US dollars every month just for Afghanistan operations, and that's accounting for recent reductions in costs. It was closer to eight billion dollars per month earlier this year.
The military-industrial complex churns through billions of dollars per month that, by and large, go unaccounted for to the public (under the guise of "national security"). Don't trip over dollars to point out pennies.
It isn't because it sucks... it is the fact that it needs a champion to be successful, and in a large organization, that champion needs to be a large number of people.
We deployed an ERP system for our small business last year. The core functionality was done previously in Quickbools and various Excel spreadsheets. We spent about $4k per employee on it.
Now we have a system that requires more ongoing money and effort than our old workflow, and for at least 40% of the process still needs to be done in Excel.
But, we can get information faster now, and I have a dashboard showing cash, AP, AR aging, and manpower utilization one click away. This basic functionality was worth about $2-3k/person to management, so now the challenge is getting more of the back workflow incorporated over time.
And our "champion" sits and shops online most of the time he is supposed to work on our objectives. Better focus and we would have been closer to budget and goals.
I am not surprised in the least.
Disclosure: I now work, as a civilian for the USAF. I used to be enlisted in the USAF.
I can't stand either Republican or Democrat parties. But you must absolutely be shitting me if you think a $700bn bailout did more harm than a couple of wars where hundreds of thousands of people (lots of them, lots of us) have been killed.
You asshole.
BING! BING! BING!
We have a winner. I am seeing this very poli-drama being played out right now at my institution. The multi-decade tenured staff will not change from business processes implemented to fit a bad system bought 3 decades ago; and will not listen because they don't have to.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Sounds to me like the software doesn't work, then. You know, if most customers go, "but we don't work that way," maybe the deficiency really does lie in the software attempting to be a one-size fits all solution in a problem space where tremendous amounts of legitimate variance exist.
If everybody would just agree to Windows, we'd have no cross platform compatibility issues with Linux, unix, Mac, etc, too. But demanding everybody adapt to fit your vision of how things should work is just about the height of arrogance. And it's unlikely that the ERP consultant demanding a complete overhaul of corporate practices to fit his pet package understands the reasons and rationale for the current practices better than the people saying, "but that's not how our process works."
Everybody has their reasons. You'd probably have more success with your rollouts if you focused on understanding them up front and working with them, Instead of demanding that the entire rest of the world change to fit your preconceived notions.
When a country is trillions in debt its all just fictional amounts of money anyways.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
derp ...
1 Billion wasted, but remember people, those entitlement programs need to be cut! They're a waste of money! Private insurance companies have overheads of 20% while the government insurance has around 4%, but lets gut entitlements anyway.... I wish we lived in a data driven world....
While I hear what you're saying, government entities, and especially the military, are also subject to legal requirements that they not do things in certain ways, or have unique requirements not accounted for in a 'best practices' system.
In most organizations the way to fix that is to start firing people. Sorry, "layoffs for restructuring".
The only times I see something like that work successfully without removing tons of people is to start small. You then slowly move more and more people into it. They each have dozens of ways to run things. You want to move process A to B you will need a procedure for that and training. On top of that you are going to have roadblockers (hint: either neuter them or get rid of them). You can not show up one day and say old process A is no longer any good use B. Then expect the next day everyone is using B. You have to do that for somethings but you need to run both for a little while. Until it becomes painfully obvious to everyone involved that yes B is better. If it is worse, guess what, no one will use it at all.
...that those dollars should not have been spent in vain!
"and will not listen because they don't have to" - You just hit the nail on the head sir. The key to any successful ERP implementation is getting buy in from the top down. In other words, the executives support it and will make sure that the people reporting to them are on board too. Otherwise we get what you just described.
If they'd gone with an agile methodology, they'd at least have SOMETHING to show for it!
Yeah, I've seen this happen too. Basically people expect the new system to look and behave exactly like their current system, nevermind that their current system is full of hacks and workarounds that exist because it happens to be a manual process. I watched someone shoot down a great web-based system for managing repair centers because it couldn't be made to follow the current process. Nevermind that every time a current process was brought up, it turned out to be a workaround for a manual process that was automated in the new system.
I hereby offer to provide the Air Force with no significant military capability for only $500 million.
One of the main reasons that companies put in ERP systems in the first place is to comply with regulatory requirements, primarily around auditing and reporting. These systems are designed to do that. That's why they come delivered with best practice processes for things like HR, Financials, etc. It can be configured in a multitude of ways to suit just about any organization.
"But demanding everybody adapt to fit your vision of how things should work is just about the height of arrogance" - First of all, I don't demand anyone to do anything. I'm there to help them. If they want me to customize it, I'll customize it. I simply point out to them the hidden costs of doing so.....increased time and effort up front and increased time and effort for every upgrade they will do. At the end of the day it's their software and I'll do what they ask me to do. Secondly, it's not my vision of how things should work. Talk to any seasoned ERP consultant and they will tell you the same thing. Generally speaking you are better off not customizing the software unless you have no other option. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
"You'd probably have more success with your rollouts if you focused on understanding them up front and working with them, Instead of demanding that the entire rest of the world change to fit your preconceived notions" - I've got a very high success rate, thanks for asking. I have been doing this for a very long time and I bring a considerable amount of experience to the table. That's why people hire me. When I tell my customers what I said above I do it because I want to help them avoid pitfalls that I have seen many times before. I'm not doing it because I want to milk them for more money or make them keep me longer. I'm doing it because I have a professional obligation to advise them on what I think is best for them. And I spend a considerable amount of time taking with their business stakeholders before I offer any advice at all.
Yes and that might account for the high failure rate for ERP projects at the federal level. You make a very good point. What I wonder is why, knowing all of this, are ERP systems selected in the first place? Square peg round hole.
Well, what SHOULD they use? I'm actually asking; I don't know.
90% of private company projects.
You don't hear about it becasue it's a private company and they just don't talk about failures. jn fact, you aren't even likely to heart about failures from other depts. at the same company.
10% fail. But the press love talking about that, so that's all you hear about, the success rarely even get mentioned.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
By "bailout" are you referring to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, the $700 billion financial system bailout that contained the TARP program, that was signed into law by G. W. Bush? The one that was later reduced by $225 billion by the Dodd-Frank act that Obama signed?
Just as often it's the contractors trying to cut corners, over promising, getting lawyers to weasel them out of contract agreements.
You're assumption the ERP = better business process is wrong. Sometime entrenched process are there for a reason, often a legal reason. Sadly the people who knew that reason have left and no one wanted to spend the money to hire someone to properly record it so they don't know. And they continue to not know until the begin to replace it. Once the agree to replace it they start spending money on the process and people can look into them, only to find out things like "WE have a contract to do it a certain way, or legal requirements mean we have to have this.
In this state we have to track workers hours this specific way. on and on.
When thinking of getting an ERP system, you need to investigate if you actually need on first. Too often ti s "This stuff is 'old;" so lets replace it becasue I want something new.
And ERP system is a box, the real world systems are a blob. Trying to fit those together is difficult and I question any process that doesn't involves 2 year of seriously looking at the current methods before coming up with a plan. after that THEN take bids to discuss which ERP system to get.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Great question. It seems to me you can go one of two ways. Either change the rules that constrict how government agencies are forced to do business or build something from the ground up that conforms to how they do business now. A monumental challenge no matter which way you go. Could the Air Force have built a 100% custom ERP-like system for $1B? Maybe, it's difficult to say. What is certain is that they would have at least something usable after 10 years, which is more than they can claim now.
Changing the procurement rules....well that's pretty hard to do too. Now you have to get Congress involved and we've seen how swiftly things work there. Part of the problem is that only a very few companies can even BID on a project of that size, and it's the same old players (Northrup Grummond, IBM, Ascenture, etc.) that got them in trouble in the first place.
I don't want to come off as anti-government here. I've worked with government clients before and they are doing a very difficult job and have little flexibility. Most of them are overworked and underpaid. Heck, if I had all the answers I'd already be rich. Instead I'm just workin' for the man :-)
Personally I think the best way to go is to create a modern, web based system specific to government requirements. Do all your integrations with XML, that way you can plug into just about any third party system will little or no problem. These off the shelf ERP systems just don't seem to have been designed for Federal requirements. State and Local governments, sure, but Federal...that's another issue all together.
The US Army's ERP project is going pretty well, though it's had it's problems along the way. The project, called General Fund Enterprise Business System or GFEBS, is nearing completion.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
Consider me unimpressed. The Swiss military spent 750 Million Dollar on a similar system called "Führungsinformationssystem Heer" that also spectacularly failed to fulfill its intended purpose (or any other purpose, for that matter). While, in absoulte terms, this may not be quite as much as the US Air Force spent, you have to keep in mind that this is the equivalent of a seventh of the annual budget of the Swiss military. Also, they have not stopped this project yet, so there is no saying they won't exceed the US Air Force project.
Am I the only one that read that as Erotic Role Play?
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
$2-3k/person
Obviously this figure does not include the time wasted training that person on antiquated buttonology, which for most ERPs runs to weeks of lost productivity.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
The ERP field is filled with so much hype, it's very hard to discern the winners from the losers.
Sure, consulting firms have "portfolios". Do YOU believe everything in sales literature?
Ideally, any automation effort (and centralized integration of existing stovepiped non-integrated systems is automation at the level of the boundaries of the pre-existing systems) should (1) support existing processes and make them more efficient by removing inefficiencies that result from non-automated communication, status tracking, information storage and retrieval, etc., and (2) accomodate incremental business process improvements. Any automation effort that doesn't return value by (1) alone initially is flawed from step 1. And if your best opportunity to realize value is making substantive change to the business processes rather than changing the technology implementing your business processes, you should do that instead, not try to hit the moving target of experimental and unproven processes with an automation effort (and that's even more true if its a massive, organization-wide, high-cost automation effort and the processes at issue are important, organization-wide, vital processes.)
"Best practices" represented by ERP systems generally reflect common industry requirements (which are often shaped by the regulatory landscape); large government instutitions are often subject to radically different operational contexts and regulatory requirements than are common in industry (often to the point of being essentially sui generis in terms of the operational context, particularly when you are talking about the military.) The fact that your product doesn't fit what your customer needs isn't a problem with your customer, its a problem with you offering your product for those needs.
I think the answer to that is the way that procurement rules, institutional culture, and other factors favor (1) contracting out (and, beyond that -- especially at the federal level but the same is true of State government in many cases -- under a set of contracting constraints where expertise in navigating the contracting-out system is a significant barrier to entry to competition), (2) using COTS solutions to the extent possible, and (3) big bang, monolithic projects over incremental progress toward a goal.
Regardless, cutting welfare is the most appropriate way to balance the budget.
Where, indeed!
Now, if they will just provide us with a detailed forensic audit of who make millions off of that deal?
http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/the_trojan_horse_in_the_debt_debate
http://www.ips-dc.org/files/5507/IPS-CEO-Campaign-to-Fix-the-Debt-report.pdf
What kills ERP comes down to two things... because its larger, it takes alot of effort to analyse the whole impact. This means you hire more consultants to analyse the impact resulting in more communication between people... resulting in a slower implementation... resulting in miss communication against expectations... resulting in quickwins to get back on track... resulting in an omniturd.
"The fact that your product doesn't fit what your customer needs isn't a problem with your customer, its a problem with you offering your product for those needs." - All the more reason for doing some analysis up front to determine if the product is a good fit for your company. There is no one size fits all solution. It's like buying an Escalade and then complaining that it gets lousy gas mileage. If the software can't do what you want it to do then don't buy it. Keep looking or build something in house.
I am curious as to how much analysis was done by the powers that be at the Air Force before committing to a contract of this magnitude. My guess would be little or none. Their first mistake was listening to the Oracle salespeople who are notorious for underestimating and oversimplifying. In my experience almost none of them are "software" people in the sense of actually implementing the product. "Oh sure, that's easy. We can do that". Salespeople get their bonuses based on the size of the sale, not how profitable it is. So if it goes way over budget it's not their problem it's a problem for the implementation team. They have already pocketed their bonus and gone off to the next customer. Always, always, get a second opinion on what salespeople are promising you.
Imagine if the Air Force had instead spent that money on unlocking the seventh chevron.
Absolutely. There are only two situations where ERP implementations go off without a hitch. Places where the customer is willing to change 100% to conform to the ERP processes, or places where the exiting processes are consistent, well thought out, routinely followed and fully documented. In the first case you are changing an organizational culture to conform new standards, tools,and processes and implementation is all about change management. In the second case you are modifying a system to support a well defined logical process. Most ERP failures involve customers who think their are case #2 and when shown to be not are less than willing to change.
Here's a thought experiment:
Take the people involved with invoicing. Have them all switch jobs/roles for 1 day. Using only documented procedures generate 10 random invoices. When it fails, because it will, you now know that you are not in Group Two. Because if your basic fundamental activity of "Get the Money for work done" is too complicated to be fully documented, then you can rest assured that nothing else in your organization is.
No more ERP in the tavern?
This... and the fact that no branch of the military really wants to have an accurate record of anything they do or spend. Congress pushes it on the Pentagon, the Pentagon (or insert branch of military here) keeps moving the goal post on the contractor until the project turns into a great big ball of shit. Then Congress or the Pentagon pulls the plug on the project and blames the contractor!!!
you must absolutely be shitting me if you think a $700bn bailout did more harm than a couple of wars where hundreds of thousands of people (lots of them, lots of us) have been killed
I'd say even mere suicide rate due to economic hardships caused by the new economic direction by itself caused more deaths than the wars. And then there's a significant decrease of the quality of life for over a billion people.
It's not the absolute amount of money that counts, this bailout had an enormous leverage with respect to which companies thrived and which did not. Instead of free market, we have crooks having effective rule. And they steal -- sometimes almost directly (like flash trading), sometimes in more subtle ways. It's not just the single $700bn bailout, it's also all the bailouts that followed. Without the US, Europe would let the banksters suffer at least some losses they caused.
If you're uneasy about comparing deaths to hardships, here's a similar case: a spam message not caught by spam filters takes several seconds of disruption (on the average, it might be less when batched or more when it causes a context switch). This means, a single decent-(or rather indecent)-sized spam run can rob people of more life than a single murder. People get upset when I claim that a spammer is worse than a murderer, but this is what numbers show.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
to implement his ORCA GOTV (Get-Out-The-Vote) system?
You probably make a living out of installing ERPs, but hear me out on this. When we were being trained in Systems Engineering, you are taught that you have to watch what is being done, select the right tool to help improve their situation and optimize operations in general. That the tool can be a stack of paper and folders or the most sophisticated computer system is irrelevant. What I consider very wrong from what you are saying is that the enterprise should adapt to the software and not the other way around. If I'm going to spend $1 billion dollars I'd rather take the Industrial Light & Magic approach and build my own tools to do what I need them to do.
I think with the amount of components nowadays, the task of creating custom systems is more of a problem of creating proper support afterwards than creating the software itself. So if a system like this is so crucial to the company, they should just have a larger MIS department in my opinion.
"You probably make a living out of installing ERPs, but hear me out on this." - I do. Go right ahead.
"What I consider very wrong from what you are saying is that the enterprise should adapt to the software and not the other way around." - Perhaps I was a little unclear. Customers most certainly do customize the software to fit their needs. I've never been on an implementation that didn't have at least some customization. When it comes to ERP systems though it's a double edged sword. You can customize as much as you want but you've got to be careful to do it the right way. You've got to have strict standards and stick to them otherwise when you do an upgrade it will be very difficult to distinguish your code from the delivered code. It works best if you can use delivered things as much as possible and customize where you have to but document it thoroughly and test it well.
"If I'm going to spend $1 billion dollars I'd rather take the Industrial Light & Magic approach and build my own tools to do what I need them to do." - That's certainly a viable option. From what I understand Amazon and WalMart built theirs from the ground up. I have another thread in here that talks about that.
"So if a system like this is so crucial to the company, they should just have a larger MIS department in my opinion." - Bingo! Mine too. The mistake that many companies make is underestimating just how much care and feeding these sorts of enterprise class software systems need. Not only in terms of upgrades that can last months or longer but just day to day maintenance...batch jobs, web servers, security...you name it. There are literally millions of lines of code and in some cases thousands of concurrent users and these are often business critical types of applications so it's a big deal if it goes down. For that you need trained and knowledgable staff.
Not sure how my post will be interpreted but this reminds me a blog post in late 90s "I love computers" by a former special forces guy (did all the stuff like weapons, explosives, scuba, parachuting including freefall,etc.) which his diatribe was about computers being implemented so logistics and supply can better manage things. [ ok let me try remembering the details of what I read 15 years ago] He went on writing how everything had to be formatted and input just right or else back to the beginning of the line. His diatribe continues of how he prepare requests for items but logistics person says you gotta do it like this and that (he says will comply but really thinking "f--- you). He went on about armies have been planning and conducting operations for centuries and move logistics of everything from beans to bullets without computers. His last sentence was "why should they listen to me, I'm just a joe."
mfwright@batnet.com
Oracle actually bought them out midway through our project. Would it surprise you to learn that it's been an expensive disaster for the most part? Of course not. Nor will you be shocked to hear that it took much longer than was planned for. But we were told that "THIS PROJECT _WILL_ SUCCEED" from the very top, so of course it "finished" with a successful rollout. It sucks, but they're still throwing hardware at it and it has weekly downtime.
I gave the guy in charge of it my condolences at the first big project meeting for good reason.
This is often the root of the problem with Government projects. The users claim they have to do things a certain way because of legislative or reporting requirements. The IT people then try and get a system that is the best fit for the existing practices, the contractors over promise to get the job, and off we go with the modifications which blow out the time and cost. It would be better if anyone starting such a project would accept that a significant amount of 'business process re-engineering' is going to be required for the project to work.
What no one is tracking is the detail that THIS BILLION DOLLARS WAS SPENT ON JUST INVENTORY! Forget aircraft maintenance, depot workload management, advanced forecasting or supply optimization - these yahoos couldn't even get the receive-place-pick-and-track functions working for inventory! Granted they had to do financials, too, but tons of other organizations have made this work. CSC couldn't even do the basics to set up a where's-my-stuff inventory management system!
I think for unstructured data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki is better
Casteism
We've had software engineers come out of the military 'classified' employment system, and they just can't keep up.
I couldn't get 'clearance' because I've never had it, so they don't get my expertise of delivering programs on cost, on time. Isn't this catch 22?
If the military wanted to improve their changes of a successful program, they should change their employment practices.
Bullshit. I have been involved in dozens of ERP implementations over the years. The software works. When implementations fail it is always, in my experience, because of the people (i.e. management) making the decisions on how to implement the product.
Me: "Let me show you how Product X handles Accounts Payable"
Client: "That's not how we do it"
Me: "This might be a good opportunity to take a look at your current business practices and see if they can be done in a more efficient way"
Client: "But we've always done it this way"
Me: "Why?"
Client "Dunno...just always have. And I doubt that the team is willing to change"
Me: "Ok, we can customize the product to make it work the way you want but it's going to take more time and money. And when you do an upgrade later on there will be implications as well"
Client: "Fine. Just make it work the way we do it now"
And so it goes. Time and again I see clients go out and buy an expensive ERP system only to customize the bejezus out of it to make it look exactly like the systems they are retiring. They are not open to better business practices. Too many political headwinds.
What does this say about these clowns in the Air Force? It takes them 10 years and $1.03B to realize that the project is going to fail? On an original budget of $88M? One of the big problems with trying to shoehorn a best practice ERP system into a large government institution is that often they employ worst practices. They won't, or can't, change them so you have to end up rewriting the product to fit their ass backwards ways. The whole purpose of implementing an ERP system is to replace aging, stove-piped systems with modern integrated systems. It can work well if it's implemented properly and the right decisions are made along the way. But it's not a magic pill.
The reason for overruns is simple. They are not spending their own money.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The system dates back to 2005, when Oracle won an $88.5 million software contract,
Yea Larry fucked us again. Has this man ANY morals? I guess not.
This is why I will never buy, support, or work on an Oracle project.
progress at last...
One day, we might even stop initiating unrealistic projects
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
It appears to me that most ERP solutions bring their own business logic to the table and require the business to adjust to their way of doing things. This doesn't work with the military. The requirements are just too different from the commercial world. I believe that the best software solutions come from Commercial Off The Shelf software for everyday word processing, spread sheet, work break down structure, etc. type business functions and custom built software for all other applications. This reduces vendor lock-in, permits for a higher degree of information assurance and allows for special conditions that are unique to military software to be considered from conception. The downside is that cost projection for these type of projects is difficult and the track record for government produced anything is almost always more expensive than production by private enterprise. However, I think that the pros out-weight the cons.
Well, that's certainly part of it. That and a general lack of accountability. In the private sector if you screw up a big project you get canned. In public sector you just move on to the next project.
BING! BING! BING!
We have a winner. I am seeing this very poli-drama being played out right now at my institution. The multi-decade tenured staff will not change from business processes implemented to fit a bad system bought 3 decades ago; and will not listen because they don't have to.
You must work for the same institution I do.
USAF should have went with SAP. US Army, US Navy and DLA (Defense Logistics Agency) doing great running on SAP.